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February Secret Subject Swap Take 2: Public Humiliation-I Pee Therefore I Am

Welcome to Take Two of February’s Secret Subject Swap. This week, 14 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My prompt was submitted by Sorry Kid, Your Mom Doesn’t Play Well With Others.The prompt: Public Humiliation- if you were to share an episode of public humiliation on your personal facebook, tell other moms at your child’s school, or on your blog how would it go…

OMG I am so embarrassed!

If I were Ron White, which I’m not, I’d be able to spin a great yarn of how I was thrown out of a bar, or was drunk in public, or was part of a “Pho-toh Op-por-TUNE-it-ty. I don’t think I have ever been publicly humiliated, but there have been numerous times that I have peed my pants in public due to having two children, such as when I peed my pants at Wal-Mart and have participated in any sort of jumping exercises at the gym. This by the way is and probably will always be my most popular post. That’s great, huh, to be known for peeing! Now I make my husband get the dog food and it’s all good. I also shared some of my less fun moments on (Less Than) Stellar Moments in Life awhile back.

I’m shy, socially awkward, and try to rock the boat as little as possible. I try to blend into the woodwork, because every time I open my mouth and say something I feel like it’s a humiliating moment. That’s why I blog-I can think about what I say and edit it. I don’t have an edit button for my mouth. I must say that a five second delay would be nice-the words come out of my mouth but I have a chance to edit them in the five seconds before people actually hear them.

However, it has been long enough. I will tell you a tale of my most embarrassing moment in recent history. A bit of a rehash of what happened to me when I was still working. And it also has to do with pee. How bout that?

I was driving to work to teach a class. The particular job I was doing at the time had a company vehicle that went along with it. I would drive pretty far sometimes, there were days where I would drive two and half hours just to teach a three hour class. I have a problem when I travel-I pee too much. I mean, I could stop drinking so much caffeine, but why do that? So there was usually at least one bathroom stop per commute. This particular time I was on my way south, and I really had to pee. I mean, REALLY BAD. I had to pee so badly that my eyeballs were most likely floating in my head. My bladder was in pain and ready to explode. I had no choice, I would have to stop. I had plenty of time, I’m one of those people who always arrives about twenty minutes earlier than I should, just in case something should go wrong with the equipment, which often happened and I was forced to improvise.

I also really had to stop and pick something up, so I thought I’d do the proverbial killing two birds with one stone. I stopped by the place I needed to go, which was right on the way to where I was going for work anyway, and ran in. I made it to the bathroom, barely. I did my business and stood up to flush. It was one of those really powerful noisy toilets. As the water goes down something falls out of my pocket and WHOOSH goes right down the hole.

I stood there in shock. Oh that seriously DID NOT happen! Those were the KEYS. And not just the keys to the SUV. You see, ADD me loses things aplenty. I am terrified of losing the important keys for work as well as my personal keys. So I would take a carabiner clip and keep everything together yet easily detachable. So down went the work SUV keys, my car keys, the key to my office, the key to my house, the post office key, etc, etc, etc…

I was feeling a bit woozy at this point. Sick to my stomach. Think, think, WHAT DO I DO? I had better go call someone. No wait, I should go tell them what happened. Surely they would have an idea. I walk out of the bathroom and find a woman stocking shelves. Only she does not see me. Or hear me. Or sense a disturbance in the force telling her that I am approaching. “Excuse me…” I start to say. She drops something glass and it goes everywhere.

She’s a nice little old lady. I tell her, “I think something bad just happened.” She nodded, “Yeah I didn’t mean to break that.” Oh dear… I explain what happened in the bathroom. She just looks at me for a long long time. Then she said she’d go ask the manager what they could do.

Meanwhile, I go back outside to get my phone out of the SUV to call people-first work to let them know I won’t be arriving to teach their class. Then I’d call my husband to come get me. I went to open the door AND IT IS LOCKED. This is not happening! I’m quite a ways from home, it’s not like I can walk. So now I have to go back in, and tell the people whose plumbing system I have probably ruined that now I need to borrow their phone. They don’t have a pay phone (Who has those anymore anyway? Duh.)

Luckily there is a very nice girl working there who lets me use her cell phone. Then I had to ask for a phone book, because like everyone else I don’t memorize numbers anymore, I just keep them on my phone. I call work. They are pretty cool about it. While I’m making arrangements to get my shift covered, because no one in my neck of the woods is going to go get the extra key to help me out of course, the store is still trying to reach a plumber.

Then I call Evil Genius. I tell him to go ahead and laugh. He doesn’t, because the toilet is not helping him at our house. This is because Princess Poopypants has just filled her panties with poo. But he agrees to drive the 45 minutes or so to come get me.

End result-the keys are gone. I would have to pay a plumber $200 to come in and take apart the toilet. They are probably gone anyway, he says. No one seems to believe me about this part-it was a powerful toilet! So now I have to sit and wait in this store until my husband arrives.

Now here is the most complicated part. I had to send an email message to everyone I work with trying to find someone who could meet me in town the next morning and let me in to the building so I could get the spare SUV key, and let me borrow their key until I could get another one made. Because heaven forbid they would let us keep any extra keys for the office around! Then my husband had to drive me from the office back down to the place where I had left the SUV to unlock it and drive it back to work. And THEN he had to drive me back home. I got it all done the next morning, and he still made it class on time.

For months he would give me crap every time I went to the bathroom (oh HA HA, I just realized what a clever little play on words that was)… I can’t say that I blame him. I almost caught as much crap for this as for all the times I’ve dropped my cell phone out of my pocket into the yard.

Needless to say, I won’t go anywhere near that store again for fear they’ll point me out and blame all their plumbing problems on me. That’s too bad, because I REALLY love their incense. And their candles.

Quite a story, eh? Now luckily I don’t have to face those people every day at that store, and my job has long been eliminated since that happened (nothing to do with the toilet situation and everything to do with the economy).

Most people’s responses to this story have been either laughter or stunned silence. But you see, I can kind of read minds. Here is what they are really thinking:

“She has got to be the flakiest person I have ever met.”
“Who carries their keys in their coat pocket? Don’t they know the toilet has a tractor beam?”
“I want some ham.”
“HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA… loser!”
“Note to self-do not hire this person under any circumstance.”
“I want a beer and I want to see something naked.”

To read about other things that I have lost in toilets in addition to this instance, you can click on this-Beware of the Toilet, and skip over this part of the story.

All of a sudden it just all makes sense…

So perhaps maybe not exactly what she had in mind for me to write, but hey, I’m interpreting it in my own crazy way!

Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts. Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:

About Sarah Almond

Sarah Almond "The Sadder But Wiser Girl" is a mom of two children and is married to an evil genius. Suffering from ADD, Anxiety, and a phobia of washing dishes by hand, she blogs to save the world from boringness. Though she is college educated, she would gladly trade her degree in for something useful, like a cheese sandwich.

I don’t know whether to laugh at (I mean with) you or cry for (I mean with) you. Talk about a day when everything goes wrong! Thanks for being brave enough to share this, I’ll try not to laugh loud enough for you to hear.

OMG Sarah, you’re killing me here!!! Sorry to laugh at your expense but this is such a funny story. Even funnier to me was what you THINK others are thinking after reading this post—“I want some ham” and “I want a beer and I want to see something naked”…my hands are shaking on the keyboard as I type this because I can’t stop laughing!!!! Notice you said “something” naked–does this mean it could be a koala bear or a ferret? Haha! I tagged you in my blog post this morning–let me know if you accept the challenge! Hope you do! 🙂

It’s from a Jeff Foxworthy or a Bill Engvall routine-it’s about the fact that men aren’t very deep. Women always want to know what they’re thinking, and he says that’s all they are thinking “I want a beer and to see something naked.” I’m so glad you loved it. It was the easiest post I’ve ever written.

I hope it doesn’t happen to you. But if it does I hope it doesn’t happen at Pier 1 Imports like it did to me. A store that I refer to as “The Breakable Store”, because I can’t go in there with my kids!

It was awesome… If I wanted it written a certain way I would have done it myself 🙂 That is a hilarious story. And I feel ya.. My kids flush everything down the toilet. I will spill this, but it is horrible, the boys, when they were little, would like to flush for me. WHen wiping one time, after the baby was born and the swelling went down, I dropped my wedding ring in the toilet. The kid waiting to flush did it before I had a chance to stop him. Ring.Gone. Forever.